If many music tools guide you, pointing you to particular sounds and hand-holding you on the grid, then Forester blindfolds you and drops you in the gaseous sea of a far-off moon. New videos give you a leg up in figuring out just how to access all that weird goodness.
For all the excellent software and hardware we have now, all this “production” – all the linear techniques, all the demands to get results, all the details, precise options – can start to feel like work. So artist Leafcutter John has patched together a sprawling environment that’s purpose-built for “making work feel fun!” You can feed it stems. You can play audio into it. You can run whole tracks or field recordings through it. You can let it sit there and generate sounds. You can tweak endlessly, with or without deciding to be sure of what you’re doing.
Forester is a “living thing,” and new stuff just… grows there. Forester is donationware, with payments based on your wages.
But it can be useful to have some assistance in how to use this. And this week was a big week: after a couple of years out of the public eye, Mr. John, or He Who Cuts Leaves has returned with some great new videos.
How many tools do you know that actually let you generate silence, or make stuff stop? “Quiet” does that, producing zones that calm all this generative chaos. Needle Lift, a related idea, is a node that simulates pulling a stylus off the record:
Spectral fans, rejoice, as SpectraVerb and SpectraFreeze have sprung up from the forest floor, as well – breeding with generators and granular sounds in spectral ways, as you’d expect. There’s a sense of stasis, or perhaps that your wacky neighbor Tristan Murail gave you some shrooms and you woke up in a supply closet at IRCAM:
There’s a sense of stasis, or perhaps that your wacky neighbor Tristan Murail gave you some shrooms and you woke up in a supply closet at IRCAM.
All of this is deliciously spatial by nature, so a welcome new addition is spatial mixing modes, demonstrated in a useful video:
Just because you have this crazy experimental tool doesn’t mean you can’t make it part of other toolsets and workflows, or use it as a multichannel source for other work. So, behold the multichannel recorder:
While we’re at it, here are some older videos that make useful tutorial fodder:
Gentle!
This has nothing to do with the story directly, but YouTube’s algorithm bravely started playing it – making me the 19th view instead of the 18th – and I’m all about it. Finally, Ableton Live can sound, again, like you’re in 1980s IRCAM finishing your dissertation work. I mean – sure, this probably has loads of commercial appeal. (Be the Taylor Swift of having three downloads on Bandcamp. And, really, what’s wrong with that?) Enjoy:
Previously:
And if you like that, I’ll bet you’d like stuff like this:
Since I reviewed it, Creature from the ID has come to Windows as well as macOS: